So Finncon was fantastic in all manner of ways: lovely people, reuniting with old friends, lots of fun on panels, and bringing a ton of Finnish licorice home - but there was also a surprise out of nowhere:
We arrived at an international writers' kaffeeklatsch-thing when Cheryl Morgan, who is on the Board of Directors for Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation, suddenly stood up and with a grin congratulated me for getting "Augusta Prima" on the shortlist for The Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards.

It's amazing to get this kind of recognition for all the hard work I did with the translations for Jagannath. But it's also very significant that it's "Augusta Prima" up there: this story was the first one I ever submitted and then published in English, and it was one of the stories that got me accepted into Clarion. I learned a lot writing and revising this story, too. Delia Sherman, commenting on how to make the best of this story when it still wasn't quite there, said something I still remember: "Augusta is the door". And it turned out that Augusta is not only the door through which the reader can enter the story, but also the gate through which I entered the great outdoors.